Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates outraged at arrest at his home

July 24, 2009
American Thinker
By Heather Agins


Dear Mr. President,


As I was driving home from taking my three year old son to school this morning I overheard a conversation on the radio about a Harvard professor being arrested for breaking into his own home.  There was a slight debate as to whether or not this was a form of racial profiling because Professor Gates happened to be a black man.  In disgust I turned the volume down but a few moments later something made me turn it back up.  That something was your voice and a particular description of the police force that I found to be quite shocking!  I thought for a moment that perhaps I had heard wrong but lucky for me several radio stations were replaying your comments on the incident and so it was confirmed.  You stated "the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody" and went on to mention "the long history within this country of African American and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement officers disproportionately...."


I am the wife of a police officer and have worked as a law enforcement dispatcher for the past three years.  Needless to say my blood was boiling and as a matter of fact it still is.  Because I myself was exposed to the level of crime that male and female law enforcements officers are faced with on a daily basis, I think I may have more of an idea than you.  Because I had to listen to my husband over a radio 50 miles away become nervous on a traffic stop in the middle of the night - I think I may have more of an idea than you.  I've had to listen to the sound of my husband's voice after just being involved in a major accident because of a drunk driver and because of this I think I may have more of an idea than you.  Every day that my husband goes to work he is putting his life on the line.  He is putting the life that we have built together on the line to serve and protect innocent people from becoming innocent victims.  Every night that he works I am unable to sleep and every morning he is expected to come home I pray that he does. 


I am fortunate that my husband has worked with two agencies whose crime rates are not as high as others.  But every time he makes an arrest he must drive through certain areas of Miami that I wouldn't see my worst enemy through. 


As I'm sure you already know but perhaps others may not, the statistics from national crime rates are drawn from a federal survey called the National Crime Victimization Survey.  If I understand correctly, this survey is given to hundreds of thousands of victims in America and asks them among other questions about the race of the criminals who victimized them.  The results of these surveys are almost entirely consistent with the results of arrest records.  Wouldn't you know it, the majority of these surveys and arrest records indicated that blacks and Hispanics are the victimizers of these crimes. 


Police officers make use of what criminological surveys tell us about who is and who isn't likely to commit certain crimes so that violent criminals don't go un-apprehended.  Otherwise, what's the purpose of the survey?  Perhaps in order to eliminate "racial profiling" we should do away with the survey all together.


I think it's safe to say that a common prejudice is that men are more likely to commit violent crimes than women, and younger people more so than older.   I don't hear you objecting to sexual discrimination or ageism for that matter.  Criminal profiling shows that serial killers are almost always white.   Police investigations of serial murders almost always target white males because of this statistic.  I haven't once heard you make mention of this in your "racial profiling" speeches.